This is the same as asking how wings come from nonwings, how lungs come from nonlungs, etc, do you believe any of these are possible? If you accept any part of evolution at all I don't see how you can ask this question. How do you get poodles from nonpoodles? Your question has already been answered by science.

In this context, by 'natural explanation' we mean something that could have come to be the way it is without any sort of intelligent guidance. In order to have reason to believe that something was intelligently designed, we need to be able to demonstrate that that something would not have happened without design. If we do not have reason to call something designed, then by definition it is unreasonable to call that something designed.

If we do not have reason to think this, then yes, it is by definition unreasonable. Is it possible? Of course.

Let us say I do not know. How does one justify 'god did it' as a reasonable answer?

Why don't you know? There's a very plausible explanation. You should know the answer as well as you have an answer for most things afaik.

I am willing to grant him the answer of 'I do not know' for the sake of argument because whether or not I do, I do not think he can justify 'god did it' as a reasonable explanation. In debate, if your opponent's claim is 'X is true' but he cannot give reason as to why it is true, you do not have to provide an alternate explanation. I prefer to leave alternate explanations out of a debate if my opponent cannot justify his own position in the first place. To illustrate, let us say we are having this conversation 2000 years ago and we have no knowledge of evolution. My contention is that 'god did it' is still not an acceptable answer.

How is this done?

It's an arcane question, I'll admit. This isn't a simple problem of negating the negative to yield the positive, as vixticator is trying to do by applying the prefix non to any word. The answer is rooted philosophically.

As I said in another thread multiple times, "God did it" is not the explanation, but pointing to the originator, yet so many make this mistake of thinking that God is offered as the explanation. Of course, it can't be. Because even if you grant that, "okay, God did it," you still have to explain how He did it. In other word you have to be able to understand how it was done in the physical world. Just like anything else, if you ask who made that, you give them the name of the inventor or engineer. That says nothing about the thing was put together, does it? There are, however, some explanations that will always elude us.

That is your responsibility. You are the one claiming design Too exhausted to make much more of a response atm, will try to address the question properly in the morning.

Have you given it some thought?

A little. Still cannot think of anything outside of absurdities as far as blatantly obvious designed examples go (and again, if you do not want extreme examples, it is going to take a lot of small discoveries leading to the conclusion because of the magnitude of the discovery itself). For instance, if we traveled to another solar system, went to a planet, and saw a building with a 'Welcome' sign and a thanksgiving dinner waiting for us, that would be indicative that somebody designed that place for us. As far as the small examples go, one would be a collection of studies that demonstrated it was not possible for life to have been naturally spontaneously generated anywhere.

It's like if you explore an island that has no people on it, and you find a painting on bark hung on a tree, and it has a detailed picture of the sun, water, sky, people and animals at a level of advanced skill. You can play the blind man and say since there's no person there, no paint brush, no fingerprints, no footprints, no letter as to the painter, etc., then there's no empirical evidence. Oooor, you can say the painting itself IS empirical evidence, which is what Romans 1 says. You can say "we just don't know enough yet", or you can say we know enough to know this took a person to make (common sense).

So, which other universe are you going to point to so you can say, "well, we know what made this one, and our looks the same ..." like you're doing with the painting you stumbled on?

So if we stumbled upon a piece of alien technology on the moon unlike anything that has ever been seen, you would not be able to tell the difference between that and a rock?

So, which other universe are you going to point to so you can say, "well, we know what made this one, and our looks the same ..." like you're doing with the painting you stumbled on?

For the moment, let us put aside the fact that this question is unanswerable as we cannot even conceive of what something that in no way resembles anything we have ever seen before would look like. Can I physically tell the difference between it and a rock? If it has different features, of course. Can I tell whether it is designed or not? Maybe yes, maybe no. If no, then clearly we cannot infer that it was designed. So let us say 'yes.' I can differentiate it by contrasting it with those things which are not designed. Now what?

It clearly wouldn't be like a rock, so yes.

However, to answer without being a git - I would point out that

1) according to you a rock is designed also, yet you just used it as an example of an undesigned thing (Ok I can't quite stop being a git it seems...)

2) the features that allow us to recognise a watch or painting as being designed are those things we've never found in nature, yet know from our general experiences are the result of people designing. If we found a lump of 'something' with no recognisable elements/traits/anything similar to what I already know - I doubt very much I'd leap to 'it's designed'. I'd suspect it was some previously unknown lunar/meteor/something else process.

Interestingly enough, using the rock as an example of something undesigned represents one of the biggest problems of the entire argument from design (those that try to use the 'suppose you had never seen a watch before' approach). The way in which we would be able to distinguish the object as designed is by contrasting it with its natural surroundings. The implication, of course, is that there is some inherent difference between that which is naturally occurring and that which is designed. But the argument's conclusion is that our natural surroundings are designed. Ultimately, the argument boils down to, 'we can see our natural surroundings are designed because they are not designed.'

no it doesn't. You need to pay better attention to what the argument is. You do realize that design detection is used successfully in science, right?

Yes, it does. I'm sorry, but the argument from design is one of the weakest at the apologetic's disposal (with the argument from morality and Pascal's Wager closely behind - ignoring, of course, all of the ridiculous ones like the ontological argument). Even the best arguments from design do not use the 'suppose you have never seen a watch before' approach. I know you really want it to work. But the fact of the matter is, the ones which do use this approach all suffer from that particular defect.

Of course. You do realize that not all arguments from design, let alone other instances of 'design detection' suffer from this flaw, right?